Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Reforming the Norm

At
the start of the Reformation, Europe was glad to be free from the Roman
Catholic Church’s “domination.” The Lutheran
Church, Calvinist churches, and Mennonite and Baptists churches surged forward as
society reconfigured its moral base. These are patterns we can understand and
recognize in our own day—religious reform happens all the time, globally and
locally. Like those who lived in the days of the Reformation, we see others’
choices to abandon, adopt, or switch up their spiritual lifestyles as
expressions of being free from domination.
As long as a person chooses for him or herself, it seems, domination can be avoided. But, there is one element of the
Reformation’s ban on power that hugely contrasts our day’s anti-control attitude:
the actual definition of domination.

In
an era when people wanted to choose for themselves, many were still fine
leaving interpretation of the Bible to the pros. How could a people so eager to
learn truth not demand personal access to scripture? As our readings for today
state, “It seems odd to us that Christians should not read their own book, and
so we conclude that the only reasons for forbidding such activity must
necessarily have been malicious. That would be a misleading conclusion. . . . The
general opinion in the Middle Ages was that the Bible was a difficult and
subtle text that required special training to read properly. Not only was the
text itself difficult, but the Devil was ever ready to mislead and confuse the
uneducated into false interpretations.” Today, freedom from domination means
freedom to do absolutely anything we please. But according to our readings,
that hasn’t always been society’s definition. The Reformation was not a
complete forsaking of all societal ideals, norms, and expectations. Despite
demanding religious change, people still believed in religious order and the
need for leadership, guidance, and real authority. The Reformation shook things
up, but did not turn everything inside out. The clarification in our readings that
people respected the pattern of learning about the Bible from those trained in
how to interpret it shows that the Reformation was slow-growing; it was major
in terms of forsaking old ways, but gradual in its complete transformation of
societal values. It took much longer for people to demand access to the Bible than to demand other changes.

1 comment:

Other things to remember, too, are literacy rates: not as many people could have read the Bible even with access to it. One of the major movements of the reformation was a shift to preaching straight from the Bible, and reading it in the congregation's native tongue. There were also several projects to translate the Bible into common languages, the most famous being Tyndale (ironically enough, Latimer was on the counsel that condemned him).